still get to enjoy at oxford and cambridge, so i think that by the time he was 16 or 17 he d had a world class education it was just done by doing a science rather than by learning about science. lawrence, can i ask you what you think his i mean, this is a very difficult question, maybe not a fair one what was his greatest contribution, do you think, in terms of his achievements? because they cover so many fields. yeah, i don t think you can say there s one. i think his service as the first director of the national museums of kenya that became a world class research institution. his role in building the kenyan wildlife service into a world class anti poaching fighting force. has advocacy for the environment as evidenced most clearly by coining the phrase the sixth extinction in his 1994 book. has role in promoting human evolution, most notably, in many ways, through the bbc
Geographical Magazine Writer s Reads: Laurence Smith, author of Rivers of Power Written by Geographical 2021 Laurence C Smith is a professor of environmental studies and professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Brown University. His latest book, Rivers of Power, is an expansive exploration of the role rivers play in shaping our world
The Sixth Extinction • Elizabeth Kolbert • 2014
Kolbert’s beautifully written Pulitzer Prize winner documents the extraordinary scale of species loss under humanity’s watch – ranking us right up there with just a small handful of massive extinction episodes in Earth’s history.
The perfect bookend to Kolbert’s
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Scouted/John Kleiner/Penguin Random House To read Elizabeth Kolbert before bed is a mistake. Her Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Sixth Extinction, will make you rethink what it means to be a human, and consider your place and impact on the world. The New Yorker Staff Writer’s latest book, Under a White Sky, is just as compelling, if not more so. I had the pleasure of talking with her recently about her new book, which traces a plethora of mistakes we as a society have made — the introduction of invasive species into fragile ecosystems, for one — and our often ill-planned solutions to them, solutions that more often than not, appear to have made things worse. “Our track record isn’t very good,” she told me.Buy on Amazon, $25A lot of books about environmental destruction, I find, both gripping and distressing—at times it can feel as if there is no solution to these grand problems. And yet, Kolbert sai
unusual moment in human history. we are powering a lot of carbon monoxide into the stee atmosphere. we want to see the world markets to emerge and get stronger and it happens more and more people come online and more energy is our need around the world. how do we reconcile those two competing dynamics? i know we want cleaner energy but how do we satisfy these and, at the same time, address this clear problem? i think that is, you know, the question of our time, exactly. how are we going to reconcile this? we do want people who are living in poverty and are energy poor is the phrase to lead better lives and we also realize, you know, very clearly that we shouldn t be pouring all of this co 2 into the atmosphere. that is the question, exactly. read the book. the book is the sixth extinction. elizabeth ko lbert, thank you fr joining us. up next, actor zachary